Author: David Fonvielle

In this article, you are going to learn about 17 of the best free online web development courses, which you can start today to help you become a web developer.

Whether you’re looking for a career change, a higher salary, or just want to have some fun building your own websites, these coding courses will help you.

4 best websites for free online web development courses

Although there are tons of websites that provide free lessons on coding in one way or another (for example, there are lots of YouTube videos on programming), this article focuses 4 websites which offer high quality coding courses that thousands of students have taken.

These 4 websites generally offer a mix of free and paid online courses, so the links provided below take you to the free courses that are offered:

You can jump to any of these websites right now, if you want to begin exploring their free programming and web design courses, or you can take a look below at some of the selected courses offered on these websites.

HTML & CSS Courses

If you are new to web development, you’ll want to begin by learning the basics of HTML & CSS, since this is the foundation of web development in general.

Fortunately, there are a wide variety of free HMTL & CSS online courses, so browse some of the courses listed below, and see which one works best for you.

1. HTML & CSS Course at Codecademy

In this course you’ll learn the fundamentals of HTML, including how to create paragraphs, lists, tables, divs, and spans. (If you don’t know what some of these terms mean, then take this course to find out!)

You’ll also get an introduction to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), where you’ll learn how to use CSS to make your HTML pages look great. You’ll learn about selectors, including class and ID selectors, as well as how to position elements on a page with CSS.

jQuery Courses

Once you have a basic understanding of JavaScript, take a look at jQuery, which is a JavaScript library.

To help you understand the power of jQuery, think of different lines of JavaScript code as being lego pieces that you can use to build your website. jQuery gives you a bunch of these lego pieces pre-assembled in useful ways, saving you tons of time and work!

7. jQuery Course at Codecademy

In this course, you’ll learn how to make your websites respond to user interaction using jQuery.

You’ll learn how to select elements with jQuery so that you can manipulate them in various ways, like by making elements fade in or fade out, and a lot, lot more.

Ruby Programming Language

Part of becoming a web developer is learning different programming languages, such as JavaScript, SQL, C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, and on and on.

If you’re new to programming and web development, put Ruby high on your list of programming languages to learn, after you’ve picked up the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The reason for this is that Ruby is one of the friendliest programming languages in the world. Even if you don’t know anything about coding, you could read some Ruby code and have a decent idea of what it does. So it’s a very good introduction to programming.

To get you started, here are some free Ruby online courses for you to check out.

12. Try Ruby

Try Ruby teaches you the basic building blocks of Ruby in a fun, easy, interactive way.

It was created by Why The Lucky Stiff, also known as _why. If you’ve never heard of _why, before, do yourself a favor and look him up.

In a nutshell, _why came online and did an amazing job teaching beginning programmers how to code, and then one day, he just deleted his presence online (the best he could) and disappeared, provoking strong, mixed reactions within the web development community.

The good folks over at Code School have kept Try Ruby alive. (And, _why, if you’re reading this… Thank you for everything you contributed. You are missed.)

13. Ruby Course at Codecademy

In this course, you’re introduced to Ruby, an object-oriented programming language that works well on its own or as part of the Ruby on Rails web framework. (You’ll notice that Codecademy says it was built with Ruby; it was actually built with Ruby on Rails.)

More Free Web Development Courses

There is always something else you can learn. In fact, the learning never stops, so if you like learning new things all the time, web development will be an excellent, enjoyable field for you.

If you are completely new to web development, it is highly recommended that you start with the HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery courses listed above, as well as learn a little bit of SQL and Ruby to broaden you’re programming skills.

And if you’re hungry for more, move on to these additional web development courses.

14. Try Git

In web development, Git is used for version control.

What does this mean, and why is this important?

As a web developer, you’ll write lots and lots of code all the time, and your website will evolve in all sorts of different ways. And sometimes, your website might take a turn for the worse, or you might want to revert back to an earlier version of your site quickly and easily.

With version control, you can always get back to a good working version of your website, which is just one reason why learning version control with Git is so important.

How can you become a better web developer with what you’ve learned?

You just learned that if you want to become a web developer (or a more skilled web developer or web designer) that there are plenty of free courses that you can take online to help you on your journey.

You learned about 4 sites where you can get a healthy selection of web development courses for free, and you also saw 17 of the courses on those sites that you can start taking today.

So go ahead. Check out these free courses and start improving your web development skills today.